Martin Luther King Day, 2020 -- It was a deeply painful spectacle to watch. In front of perhaps a thousand people, the President of my university was called upon to…
Like much of the world’s population, I have spent the last four years contemplating what has led so many people to support Donald Trump, despite a series of shameful…
Yes, there was always someone who screwed up before students arrived in our classes. There were parents who failed their children, teachers who failed their students, and a society…
Several decades ago, when the writings of Michel Foucault were at the peak of their popularity in academia, my former colleague, Jim Riley, remarked insightfully that what was most…
It was a test of my parenting, and I think I passed. We were on a trip to investigate colleges with our teen-aged son, and Yale had become part…
It is a lovely image, a beautiful example of the high quality of contemporary newspaper photography. The composition is perfect. The diagonal slats of the blinds carry the viewers’ eyes…
Jean-Luc Goddard’s 1963 agitprop film, Les Carabiniers, was a New Wave shaggy dog story. For most of the somewhat tedious film the two loutish protagonist commit a series of…
This blog was initially inspired primarily by my sense that students and their learning had relatively little value in the decisions made in higher education. To capture this concern,…
In higher education, as in so many other areas of our lives, the COVID-19 virus has turned the world upside down. At least in the short term the impossible has…
[For some time two concerns have hovered in the back of my consciousness: the total inability of contemporary culture to generate visions of a positive future and the absence of…